[Targon]

Apple to buy Avid was and still is only a rumor to us. Besides i heard the deal was already done, u say they are still negotiating. Either way its just a rumor. I think Avid woould be too expensive a purchase for Apple right now. Look how much they have spent on these new stores and their profits arn't exactly huge atm. Besides, Avid is a company aimed at professionals, Apple now days seems only really interested in the toy shopping market.

I think Digi is wasting their resources developing Midi Time Stamping technology over USB. The reason is, Firewire already has timing information. USB doesn't have and timing information built into the protocol thus the need for proprietory time stamping technology is needed. It would seem to make more sense to just develop Firewire based MIDI/Audio products for the lowend market since on the Mac thats where things are clearly headed. USB 2.0 otoh still does not have any timing info and is not really on Apple's roadmap. Best to get into developing FW stuff now, be ahead of the curve with less to do later on.

I suspect Apple will have their future PPC chips supplied by IBM, while Motorola may continue to supply G4 chips for lowend iMacs and like products.

Mac hardware really is the laughing stock of the computer industry right now. We are blindly getting ripped off by Apple with the cost of the Powermac lineup. The hardware is very lowend compared to PC hardware of 6 months ago and the CPU's are much slower than offerings by AMD. While the Mac OS is great to use, the line of a nice OS and a pretty case between blatently outdated slow hardware is getting dangerously close to being drawn for me and many other Mac users i know. In short Apple better get their shiot together by the end of this year.

Targon